Autorretrato con la gripe española

The flu that swept the world in 1918 and 1919 killed somewhere in the tens of millions, more people than the war that had just ended. Munch caught it, or believed he had, over that winter, and he painted himself in the middle of it. He sits in a yellow wicker chair beside an unmade bed, wrapped in a robe, his face slack and greyish, his mouth open as if breathing were an effort. He was 55 and had come through where so many did not. He would live another 25 years. Scholars now are not sure he really had the Spanish flu at all, and some read the picture as Munch dramatising illness, a subject that had shadowed him since he lost his mother and sister to disease as a child.